Founded in 1979, the Long Beach Opera is the oldest operatic company in the metropolitan Los Angeles and Orange County region. Formed by the Long Beach Symphony Association to mark the inaugural season of the city’s Terrace Theater, the then-named Long Beach Grand Opera quickly grew into its own entity under the leadership of Michael Milenski, formerly of the San Francisco Opera and San Jose Opera.

Under Milenski’s guidance, the company developed a reputation worldwide for its combination of visual drama and high musical standards. With a repertoire of more than 70 operas, including early and late Baroque works, 20th century works, and operas of special interest from the standard fare, LBO became well known for its world, American, and West Coast premieres. The only element lacking was community support.

In 2004, Milenski retired and was succeeded as artistic and general director by conductor Andreas Mitisek. A native of Austria, he served as music director of the Wiener Operntheater from 1990 to 1997. He is also increasingly sought after as a guest conductor in North America, leading productions for prestigious companies including the Seattle Opera and Yale Opera. While he retains his predecessor’s expanded vision, Mitisek has also expanded the opera company’s standing within the city. In his first year, Mitisek successfully boosted ticket sales by 270 percent. Last year, his innovative approach brought the once-struggling opera company’s finances into the black.

Mitisek maintained the LBO’s mission of reinventing rare, classic, and overlooked works. Though the early days were marked by the presentation of staples including Verdi’s “La Traviata,” LBO focuses on works that are contemporary or seldom performed. This tone was established in 1983 – 84 with Britten’s “Death in Venice” and Monteverdi’s “Coronation of Poppea.” Works such as “La Traviata” are now left to neighboring companies like the LA Opera or Orange County-based Opera Pacific.

To further set LBO apart from its neighbors, Mitisek presents his unusual repertoire in unusual settings. Last year, its presentation of Grigori Frid’s “The Diary of Anne Frank” was staged in parking garages. So successful was that production that it will close the opera season this year. Making creative use of a local landmark, the company launched this season with a version of Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Orpheus & Euridice” at the Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool.

This site-specific approach “helps to enhance a performance to become an experience,” says Mitisek. “That’s what we aim to do—create intimate experiences of opera. It’s almost a Renaissance feeling that art is taken to people where they are.” The idea, he explains, is to take art to the people, giving them the opportunity to view everyday spaces in a completely different way.

The staging at the Olympic Pool, for instance, was a bold effort to attract new people and to get them to rethink the mundane. “People came who were curious after having swam in that pool for years and couldn’t imagine turning it into something else,” says Mitisek, noting that the water served as a metaphor for the River Styx, where Orpheus crosses over into the underworld.

Setting-as-metaphor also figures heavily in the upcoming production of “Anne Frank.” Last year, the opera was performed both at the Sinai Temple parking lot in Los Angeles and in the Long Beach City Hall parking garage. “The whole environment of a place where you don’t think about spending five minutes beyond parking your car and going in and out was, for me, a metaphor of Anne Frank,” says Mitisek. “She didn’t want to spend five minutes in the place she was forced to be in. Within that setting, the positive attitude Anne Frank had towards her life and her situation transcended those places into a beautiful place in some sense.”

It is his European background that gives Mitisek his unique perspective on the spaces around him. For instance, because it is unusual to have so many parking garages in his native Vienna, Mitisek is sensitive to the structures’ effect on the landscape. Most of these structures strike the director as ugly and needlessly off-putting. He often thought about turning them into something different, leading to the “Anne Frank” staging.

LBO’s success isn’t just because of creative stagings, no matter how much publicity and good word-of-mouth those generate. The company also welcomes well-known singers and celebrities. “Orpheus & Euridice” featured Metropolitan Opera star Elizabeth Futral. Movie and TV star Michael York joined the company to read Tennyson’s poem “Enoch Arden” before being joined on stage by life-size puppets in composer H.K. Gruber’s “Frankenstein!!” Later this season, mezzo-soprano Frederica Von Stade makes her exclusive Los Angeles appearance in a recital of 20th century French and American works. She will be accompanied by pianist Jake Heggie, the composer of the acclaimed operas “Dead Man Walking” and “The End of the Affair.”

That LBO continues to draw such a high caliber of artist attests to the company’s worldwide standing and to Mitisek’s driving influence. “I think what is important is finding a reason why we do a work,” he says. “There should be some kind of relevance to our lives. Our mission, or the mission of art in general, is to open new doors for audiences and to expand the horizon of people’s perceptions. We’re just pushing the envelope.”

As a small company, LBO is always forced to work economically, a challenge faced by performance companies in general. “We are limited in resources for marketing money,” Mitisek points out. “We can’t buy an ad in the Los Angeles Times. That would eat up half our budget. So we depend on word-of-mouth and the very limited resources we have.”

While finances can stop LBO from reaching more consistently to people who might like what they do, good word-of-mouth is reaching quite a few. Mitisek estimates that only about a quarter of LBO’s core audience is based locally, with the remaining fans coming from Orange County, Los Angeles, and the Pasadena area. To help increase visibility, Mitisek expanded LBO’s offerings from a short June festival to a February – June schedule. To help increase fundraising efforts, Mitisek hired the opera’s first full-time development director. Mitisek sees this as an investment in the opera’s future and as a necessity of the American market. As he says of working on these shores, “Great art needs great sponsors.”

The future of the opera rides both on Mitisek’s continuing creativity and on the reputation of Long Beach itself. “There’s this myth in Los Angeles that Long Beach is so far away, and some people still think it’s the sailors’ town from the ‘50s,” says Mitisek. “I think it’s great branding for the city itself to have an opera company that is so well-respected. Anyone in the opera community in America knows about Long Beach Opera. The name of Long Beach comes all the way to Vienna!”

For a complete schedule of events, visit www.longbeachopera.org